Noah is Now a Master!

After an almost 5-year journey, Noah has officially earned his Master's Degree in Computer Science!!!!

Noah worked so hard every quarter, taking one class at a time, while also working full-time and juggling his responsibilities as a husband and father. It was definitely overwhelming at times and he/we could not have made it through this process without the wonderful support and prayers from our family and friends, especially during the last few weeks as Noah completed his final project.

I am mostly ignorant when it comes to anything related to computer engineering, but I will do my best to (correctly) explain Noah's final project. :)

For his project, he worked with UCSD National Geographic Society Engineers for Exploration and he developed an object tracking feature to a quad-copter (like a 4-propeller helicopter) , that flies around by remote control to take pictures of wildlife/landscapes for National Geographic.

None of this made any sense to me until I actually got to see Noah test the copter in our garage. Although the testing conditions in our garage were rather limited, it was fun to see! I got to turn on the throttle of the copter while Noah kept it from crashing (!) and we got to see it pull towards the red target item at different locations around the garage (this was the goal--to track the red object!). And the really cool thing I got to see firsthand is just how amazingly smart and talented my husband is!! Because of his amazing brain (thank you, Lord!), he was able to basically use math (complicated algorithms, trigonometry, etc) and create a formula that told the flight computer on the copter to fly to the object it detected. WOW! This blows my mind since I am not even able to do multiplication in my head. :)

Noah worked on this project for 10 weeks and there were many ups and downs during the process. The most difficult time was the last 3 weeks when problem after problem kept coming up with the copter itself, which made testing very difficult. As the deadline approached, Noah's anxiety continued to rise and he doubted whether he would finish in time and doubted whether the panel of Professors would accept his project as demonstrating Master's level competency. Thankfully, on the day of his presentation, he was filled with peace and the presentation flowed smoothly, with a final result of acceptance from the Professors! Thank you, Lord!

We are so relieved and excited for Noah to be completely done with school! And I am so proud of how hard Noah has worked to achieve this great accomplishment!

Don't let the smirk fool you!

This was Noah's cave of drudgery for many weeks as he plugged away on all that math!

The multi-copter in flight

View of the underside

Test flight

Noah is holding the red object while the pilot flies the copter

Yes, this is really used by National Geographic!

Congratulations, Noah!

Keira and I are so proud of you!